1 Answer
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I would suggest using Adobe Flex if you are a programmer. Then you could create your own and have it behave anyway you want. Flex is pretty easy for Java or C# programmers to pick up, since the syntax is similar (well minus the MXML part).

I haven't made a MP3 player in Flex 3 but I did make a VideoPlayer with Adobe FlexBuilder. It was very easy to do and with flash/flex you can have the player look very neat (fading in&out play buttons...). There is an example on adobe's site on how to build a podcast player in Flex 3, that reads the source URLs from an RSS feed: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=Working_with_Sound_02.html go here and select the sub-node named: Example PodCast player.

Hitting your points:

ability to create hyperlinks that play
small portions of a large online .mp3
file

You could customize the player to take FlashVars, so that it knows only to play a portion of the file. But if this is for sampling before buying I would suggest just having a short version of the sound file.

a built-in player (e.g. Flash or
Silverlight), such as this built-in
Flash player one at dotnet rocks where
-- if you have Flash -- users just see it, click it and it starts playing
audio

Flex = Flash, so yes

is a free solution and does not
require a separate audio server

No audio server needed but you would need to compile your code. So you would need FlexBuilder(not Free) or FlashDeveloper(Free).